A sprawling adventure set on the backs of enormous living creatures drifting through a sea of clouds, each one a whole country you can explore. You fight in real time by chaining timed button presses into bigger combos with the partners you collect along the way. The combat takes a good while to explain itself and the anime tone is strong, but the scale and the soundtrack are unmatched.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
The verdict
It's messier and more divisive than its sequels, burdened by clunky menus and fan-service character designs that undercut an otherwise ambitious story.
The mechanics
The Blade-swapping combat takes hours to click, but once it does, the layered timing-based system becomes one of the more rewarding in the genre.
Presentation
Massive titans and sweeping vistas give the world real scale, even if texture pop-in and rough frame rates betray the game's technical reach.
Staying power
Its flaws are real, but the scope and eventual payoff make it worth pushing through for anyone with patience and a taste for sprawling JRPGs.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
The setting is the hook. The world is an endless sea of clouds, and every country sits on the back of an enormous living creature drifting through it. You climb across shoulders, explore forests growing on their backs, and look down at the clouds below. Each one is a big open area full of wildlife, side quests, and things far too strong for you that you learn to avoid until later.
You fight in real time without a separate battle screen. Your character attacks automatically while you time button presses to trigger bigger moves, and stringing those together in the right order sets up long combo chains that end in enormous elemental explosions. It is genuinely satisfying once it clicks, but it takes ten or fifteen hours before the game has finished explaining itself, and the tutorials are famously poorly presented. Many people who love it will admit they bounced off the first time.
Alongside your main characters you collect partners called Blades, which are drawn from a random pool, and each gives your fighter a different weapon and element. That randomness frustrates some players who want a specific one. The story is a big earnest adventure with anime sensibilities and character designs to match, which is either charming or off-putting depending on taste. What is not in doubt is the scale, the ambition, and one of the best soundtracks in any game. Budget eighty to a hundred hours.